We Don't Need to "Defend" Obama On Health Care

He's a big boy, and can defend himself.

By getting behind the "BEST" policy on health-care for the whole country, not jusat for his patrons in the HIP (Health-Insurance Parasites).

It's NOT for-profit 'insurance.' It's not a 'public option' or some kind of skeevy "co-op" approach.

No one should be denied care for treatment of treatable maladies. Period.

Lambert had it right (via):

The public option is not some sort of compromise. It is not some kind of gentle glidepath to single payer, since the legislation will be designed to make the transition to single payer FAIL, as Kathleen Sibelius admits. And as the public option FAIL takes 10 years or so to play out, it will suck all the oxygen out of real policy change and discredit government involvement in health care into the bargain, as Medicare Part D is doing — making the transition to single payer even less likely. Meanwhile, Versailles, having guaranteed a market to the insurance companies by mandating participation, will chip away at the subsidies that make it possible for the 50 million uninsured to participate in that market, screwing them even further. And as the FAIL plays out, many hundreds of thousands will continue to be denied care, and thousands of them will die. How can any progressive support the public option with a straight face?

Progressives shouldn’t waste their time and energy on the public option; that public option is at the extreme left of “serious” discourse means absolutely nothing in policy terms, because the Overton Window is skewed so far right that no workable policy is available anyhow. Let Dean do what he thinks he needs to do; let the career liberals in MoveOn, SEIU, and OFA use public option as a fundraising vehicle; wev. None of this is relevant, and all of it is a distraction.

I have had issues with lambert (or he with me, i fergit), but he's right in the money here. As is Avedon Carol:

We need a not-for-profit plan that everyone pays for and no one can opt out of that is available to everyone. We need healthy people to be paying for it while they are still healthy and can afford to pay for it, or we aren’t sharing enough risk. We need to keep the CEOs and shareholders out of it and have something that works for everyone. We need single-payer.
...
Americans may not think healthcare is the #1 economic priority we have today, we do think it’s a priority. Americans have been lied to about whether the choice is between paying more for healthcare or getting healthcare reform, but that of course is not the choice, and I doubt we’d have any trouble selling single-payer to a single decent and honest soul if people were told that single-payer would save money instead of costing more. But of course, Obama’s plan isn’t single payer, and it is expensive, and (its) real problem is that (many people) feel the need to defend Obama rather than defend good healthcare policy.

And that’s been the problem with all of these people who continue to lose sight of the policy issues themselves. It’s all very well to dispute the lies the right-wing tells about the Obama plan, but that doesn’t mean we can’t also dispute the lies Obama himself has been telling us. He’s not trying to get you healthcare, and we’re not going to get it if “good progressives” keep letting him get away with it.

Obama and the Dims, along with all the Pukes, are doing everything but tell the truth on health-care reform. Insurance is NOT the best way, not the most efficient way, the most effective way, the most humane way to care for people--though it does keep *HIP" moneys flowing into the coffers of the two wings of the Party of Property, Privilege & Power. For-profit insurance companies have built-in incentives NOT to authorize care for people: Premiums not spent on care are automatically deemed to be "profit."

No nation is civilized which subordinates the health of its people to the wealth of its elites.